Sam Zell's dictionary is missing a page

Chicago Tribune

Sam Zell, founder and chairman of Equity Group Investments, speaks during a Chicago Ideas Week event at Cadillac Palace Theatre on Oct. 18, 2016. Zell also addressed a business lunch at the downtown Mid-America Club on Nov. 1, 2017.

Sam Zell, founder and chairman of Equity Group Investments, speaks during a Chicago Ideas Week event at Cadillac Palace Theatre on Oct. 18, 2016. Zell also addressed a business lunch at the downtown Mid-America Club on Nov. 1, 2017. (Chicago Tribune)

Kim JanssenChicago Tribune

What do you get a billionaire — a man who can buy anything he wants?

In the case of real estate mogul and former Tribune owner Sam Zell, the answer might be a dictionary with all the words in it.

“What is an entrepreneur?” Zell asked at a business lunch organized by the Executives Club of Chicago at the downtown Mid-America Club on Wednesday. “It’s someone who doesn’t have the word ‘failure’ in their lexicon: Maybe it didn’t work out at the Tribune, but it wasn’t a failure.”

Given that Zell’s ownership of the Tribune Company ended in its bankruptcy, Messrs. Merriam and Webster may disagree, but Zell, who’s still worth $5.1 billion, according to Forbes, said he’d buy it again in a flash.

“If I were to make that decision today, I still would buy it, because from a risk reward point of view, the reward justified the risk involved,” he said.

Zell, who is promoting his new book, “Am I Being Too Subtle?” also quipped that entrepreneurs “have to be highly self-confident, not that it has to be justifiable, necessarily.”

And when a Chicago Inc. reporter introduced himself as being from the Tribune, Zell joked “What’s that?!”

But while he portrayed himself as being as keen a risk taker as ever, the 75-year-old confessed to Inc. that he had traded in his beloved fire-breathing Ducati motorcycles for a BMW, generally regarded as an old man’s brand.